Consequently, I did not mix with the other students. I was in one way relieved, for too many of them entertained the most cynical and bloodthirsty radical ideas. The Okhrana, the political police, came to the Institute more than once. The ordinary ‘pharaohs’ (a disparaging slang term for the police) also kept a regular eye on the place. I did sometimes miss the camaraderie I had experienced in Odessa. St Petersburg, it seemed to me, was a place where healthy companionship could not be found. I had lost the will to visit Marya Varvorovna. All the boys of my own age at the fashionable military schools kept mistresses amongst the shop-girls and smalltime actresses who were only too glad to give themselves to a ‘gentleman’. Even the skating rinks and dance-halls were in the main private enclaves for those with money. St Petersburg sometimes seemed a series of castles behind whose walls privileged people engaged in every vice and pleasure. In the meantime, on the far island outskirts of the city, like some vast besieging army of the damned, the excluded, lay the camps of a more menacing enemy than any threatening from Prussia. The inner city contained the fortresses of light, of glass and diamonds and brilliant, beautiful people. The outer city, with its huge, bleak factories, its chimneys from which poured blood-red flames and sulphuric yellow smoke, with its filthy canals, with its sirens wailing like lost souls, held the fortresses of darkness. From them one day would issue the engulfing, defiling Mob. And who was to blame for this? It was the Duma. That ineffectual body aped the parliaments of the West but failed to find any roots in Russian soil or credibility in Russian hearts. The Duma was a sop to the revolutionists. It should never have been allowed to come into existence. It had no true power at any time, save the power of speech, which it abused daily. The Duma strangled Russia with words. It talked us into the War. It talked us into Defeat. It talked us into the Revolution. It talked itself into the Bolshevik prisons and eventually it talked itself in front of Bolshevik firing squads, which is what it had deserved all along. Russia never wanted democracy. She wanted strong leadership. Eventually, at the cost of everything she held sacred, she was to receive it again.
During the Easter vacation, when we attended Church to cry ‘Christ is Risen!’, and when we exchanged painted eggs, and ate fish and cranberries, I took time off from my studies to accompany the Zinovieff girls and their boy-friends to watch a military display on the Field of Mars. As we looked at the cavalry and the Guards and the streltsi and all the other traditional regiments parading and presenting arms, their banners and flags and pennants fluttering in the first warm winds of Spring, it was simply ridiculous to think any enemy could defeat us. The Tsar was not present at this particular display, but his portrait dominated the event and we all cheered it mightily and sang the National Anthem:
I had become rather lugubrious, I think, from reading too much. This event lifted my spirits and I became quite gay, agreeing to go with the Zinovieffs and their fiancés later that week to a performance of Tchekoff’s famous
In spite of the War, the revolutionaries were out in force. Jews and Masons, saboteurs and wreckers, continued to incite the honest people to strike. Cossacks were from time to time forced to make a show of strength, though few people were hurt. Feeling against the Reds grew as the news from the Front became grimmer. More ‘brown-coats’ - political police - paid visits to the school. I was completely above suspicion. The fact that I was unpopular with the young radicals counted in my favour. Dr Matzneff, however, was frequently questioned. He would sometimes emerge from these sessions looking pale and extremely distracted.
